A practical set of rules for parents: what a child should never type, how to check whether an answer is true, and the one question that separates learning from copying.
Four rules cover most of it. One: never type a full name, school, address, phone number or photograph into a chatbot. Two: treat every factual claim as unverified until checked against a textbook or a second source — chatbots state wrong things in exactly the same confident tone as right ones. Three: use it to explain, not to produce; if the child cannot explain the answer in their own words, it does not count. Four: keep it in a shared room, not a bedroom. Most Indian services set a minimum age of 13, with parental consent required for under-18s.
Most children in Hyderabad using AI tools learned to use them from a friend or a video, and nobody taught them the safety part. The gap is not tool skill — they are usually better at it than their parents. The gap is judgement.
These are the rules we teach in class, in the order they matter.
Children are used to search engines, where typing something has no consequence. A chat interface feels like a conversation, and children disclose to conversations.
The rule is a flat list, taught as a list because rules with exceptions do not survive contact with a nine-year-old.
The test we teach children: if you would not shout it across a bus, do not type it into a chat box. It transfers well, because they already understand the bus.
This is the hardest idea to land and the most important. A chatbot predicts plausible text. When it has the facts, it produces correct text. When it does not, it produces equally fluent text that is wrong, in precisely the same authoritative tone — including invented dates, invented sources and invented book titles.
Children are used to a world where confidence correlates with knowledge. This one breaks that. The habit to build is mechanical: any name, date, number or claim that is going into schoolwork gets checked against the textbook or one other source, every time.
A useful home exercise: ask the chatbot about something your child knows extremely well — a favourite game, a local landmark, a school event — and find the errors together. Discovering it themselves teaches the lesson in a way being told never does.
The line between using AI to learn and using it to avoid learning is sharper than it looks, and it is not about whether the tool was used.
Ask one question: can the child explain the answer in their own words, without the screen? If yes, it was a tutor. If no, it was a photocopier, regardless of how the work was produced.
One rule that works well at home and costs nothing: the child reads their AI-assisted work aloud to a parent and answers two questions about it. Anything that cannot survive that goes back for another pass.
Shared room, not bedroom. Not because a child will do something wrong, but because the useful conversations — "look what it said, that can't be right" — only happen when an adult is within earshot.
On age: most major AI services set a minimum of 13, and require parental consent below 18. Younger children should use these tools with an adult present rather than on their own account. This is worth checking directly, since providers revise their terms often.
Tell your child plainly that the model is not a person, does not know them, does not remember them between sessions in the way a friend would, and has no feelings to hurt. Children — especially quieter ones — form something like attachment to a system that is endlessly patient and never busy.
It is not harmful in itself. It becomes harmful when a child brings a worry to a chatbot instead of to a person. The sentence to plant: for anything that makes you feel bad, you talk to a human.
Write these six lines, both of you sign it, stick it near the laptop. Children follow rules they helped write and ignore rules they were handed.
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